I’ve learned over the years that when I go to that place of passion within me, there’s no force in the universe that can interfere with my completing a project.

It is really very important while you are young to live in an environment in which there is no fear. Most of us, as we grow older, become frightened; we are afraid of living, afraid of losing a job, afraid of tradition, afraid of what the neighbours, or what the wife or husband would say, afraid of death.

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

You have to develop ways so that you can take up for yourself, and then you take up for someone else. And so sooner or later, you have enough courage to really stand up for the human race and say, ‚I’m a representative.‘

Because my dad abused me, I was determined to never let a man tell me what to do. God clearly showed me that I needed to be a submissive wife if I wanted to be effective in ministry. The truth is, if we don’t learn to submit to authority, we won’t ever learn to submit to God.

Ambition has become a dirty word, and I believe it is a great evolutionary force for the positive. If people fail or go astray in their ambition I can live with it but not with people lowering their expectations, wasting time, slacking off and glorifying failure and stupidity.

Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken.

You always want your people to be proud of what you have accomplished.

Every man’s memory is his private literature.

What one has to do usually can be done.

Know thyself? If I knew myself I would run away.

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent.

I treated it like every day was my last day with a basketball.

The mind is everything. What you think you become.

It was a personal decision for me to stand and say that cricket is all I have in life, there’s nothing I need to do other than cricket. If I want to achieve whatever I thought as a kid, I need to work hard and not let it go to waste.

Endurance is patience concentrated.

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

I’m a big perfectionist! I’m trying to channel super-confident women like Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey and Beyonce, because I realized that if you want something, you really have to go for it, just like they do.

The ancestor of every action is a thought.

I had wanted a tape recorder since I was tiny. I thought it was a magic thing. I never got one until just before I went to art school.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My view is that at a younger age your optimism is more and you have more imagination etc. You have less bias.

Talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether.

‚They‘ are the people that don’t believe in you, that say that you won’t succeed. We stay away from ‚They.‘

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition.

Hair is about when you’re younger. I am my hair.

Success has always been a great liar.

I’m still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

Films and television and even comic books are churning out vast quantities of fictional narratives, and the public continues to swallow them up with great passion. That is because human beings need stories.

You know, not to sound corny or nuthin‘, but I felt like a fighter comin‘ up, man. I felt like, you know, I’m being attacked for this reason or that reason, and I gotta fight my way through this.

Character is power.

I want to be the greatest actor that ever lived, frankly. I’d love that. But I don’t need to be. I just want to be here. That’s it.

To excel at the highest level – or any level, really – you need to believe in yourself, and hands down, one of the biggest contributors to my self-confidence has been private coaching.

You simply have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Put blinders on and plow right ahead.

No pressure, no diamonds.

Even when folks are hitting you over the head, you can’t stop marching. Even when they’re turning the hoses on you, you can’t stop.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

I have discovered that just because we grow weaker physically as we age, it doesn’t mean that we must grow weaker spiritually.

For me, ‚risky‘ is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is.

Basically, I live to do gigs.

We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that’s the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.

An identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

So long as a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long as he is determined not to do it; and consequently so long as it is impossible to him that he should do it.

I always feel like it’s two key ingredients when it comes to following your dreams, making something happen that the average person deems difficult. If you truly believe it, that’s step one. Step two, is, you know, the hard work that goes along with it.

There is little success where there is little laughter.

Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

You don’t come into cooking to get rich.

I am not very good with relationships. With anyone. I can’t be locked up with anyone for too long.

Applause waits on success.

Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.

I promise you, I will have something on the Internet that is game-changing. I can’t lose.

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn’t exist except as a part of everything.

I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.

I’m always afraid of failing. I have to quiet that fear if I’m going to get up in the morning.

Let him that would move the world first move himself.

People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.

Every night on the court I give my all, and if I’m not giving 100 percent, I criticize myself.

I knew early on that I wanted to entertain in some form. And I knew I would work as hard as anyone to do it.

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.

How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.